Another school drops out of the National School Lunch Program

HEMPFIELD, Pa. — Teens aren't swallowing the 1 percent white milk, brown rice and whole grain pizzas required by the federal government. Instead, they are lining up at the microwave with food they brought from home, school officials say.

As a result, Hempfield School Board voted this month to drop Hempfield High School from the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act and Smart Snacks in School legislation for a pilot of one year starting in the fall.

The middle schools and elementary schools will remain in the National School Lunch program, Hempfield school officials said.

"One of the things I want to make clear here is that we are not proposing to wheel in the french fry machine," food service director Brian Rathgeb told the board April 7. "We will still have nutritional foods with fruits and vegetables as we always have had. We would just now have more flexibility, more options."

The USDA's regulations that dictate what school cafeterias can dish out to kids — such as sodium levels, whole grains and number of vegetables — have taken a bite out of the district's food service budget.

"We are seeing our lunch and breakfast counts go down," Rathgeb said, referring to the number of students who are buying lunch.

Chief Operating Officer Dan Forry projects that the high school food services department will have lost $125,000 in lunch sales between 2010 and the end of this year. In students, that equals a drop of 50,000 lunches. Prior to the federal mandates, Hempfield High School typically would feed 210,000 lunches annually, Forry said.

Hempfield is not alone. Other schools around the state and nation have dropped the stricter nutritional guidelines of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act and Smart Snacks in School legislation.

Locally, Manheim Central High School and Manheim Township High School exited the program in 2014, also citing loss of food service budget revenue as the reason.

Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids was passed in 2010 as part of the federal government's fight to end obesity. The Smart Snacks law went into effect this school year, and it applies to "competitive" foods sold in vending machines, school stores, lunch lines and school events — those a la carte items such as chips, teas and cookies. It is an effort to curb junk food.

The latter has hurt. Forry said Hempfield School District's food service budget has lost "$200,000 just for a la carte items at the high school."

In January 2014, the Government Accountability Office published an audit of the National School Lunch program, which stated nationally 1.2 million students exited the program between the years of 2010-2011 and 2011-2012. States reported students did not like the taste, and schools struggled with the complicated rules. States also reported food waste and rising costs for meeting stricter requirements, according to the report.